Bringing 500 years of anatomical HISTORY into one room, and what it takes to get that right
The human body has been studied, drawn, dissected, and disputed for centuries. Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy at ArtScience Museum asks why, who was doing the looking, and what they believed they were seeing when they looked. It’s a subject that requires no introduction. Everyone has a body. Yet few have stopped to consider how far back the obsession with understanding it goes, or how radically that understanding has shifted across time and culture. This exhibition traces exactly that, and does it in a space that has always positioned itself at the intersection of art and science. There may be no better home for it.
The exhibition draws on over 160 works: life-sized illustrations, woodcuts, rare anatomical atlases, and contemporary installations. It was developed in collaboration with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and building something like this takes years before the public ever walks in. Curators begin with a thesis. Here, it’s the relationship between seeing and understanding the body, and then spend months, sometimes years, tracing which objects actually carry that argument. Loans are negotiated with institutions across multiple countries. Conservators assess whether fragile atlases dating back centuries can travel, and under what conditions. Some works that were initially selected don’t make the journey. Others surface late, from unexpected collections, and change how the whole thing is sequenced. The depth of that research shows, not in a way that overwhelms, but in the way pieces speak to each other across centuries and disciplines.
Image Credit: MONO Malaysia
Anatomy has never been a purely scientific pursuit. The earliest anatomical drawings weren’t just documentation, they were obsession. In many cases, acts of defiance against what was considered knowable about the human form. Leonardo da Vinci spent years dissecting corpses in secret, not just to understand the body but to draw it with a precision that hadn’t existed before. That relationship between seeing and understanding is the thread the exhibition pulls from the very beginning, and it doesn’t let go.
What Flesh and Bones does well is refuse to treat Western anatomical history as the whole story. The exhibition brings in diverse cultural practices and perspectives on the body. How different traditions have mapped it, named it, feared it, and revered it. The body has never meant the same thing everywhere. Deciding which voices to include, and how to give them equal weight rather than folding them into a Western-centric narrative, is one of the harder editorial choices a curatorial team makes.
Image Credit: MONO Malaysia
That diversity of perspective, how the body has been mapped, feared, and revered across cultures is made physical in one of the exhibition’s most striking installations. Artist Chiharu Shiota’s web of red string runs through the space, anchoring both the entrance and the close. The work operates on two registers at once. In East Asian mythology, the red thread of fate connects those who are bound to one another. Across distance, across time, regardless of circumstance.
In the body, red is the colour of veins and arteries, of blood moving through systems so intricate they took centuries to map. Shiota’s installation holds both meanings simultaneously. The lines run between points, between bodies, between ideas. Suggesting that the invisible connections between people and the biological systems that keep them alive are, in some sense, the same kind of thing.
Image Credit: Marina Bay Sands
Then there’s the body in death. Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Class is exactly what it sounds like. A classroom, except the students are dead. Six bodies lie on silver morgue trays arranged across a room lined in white fabric. She stands at the front, dressed in black, chalk in hand, and she writes her subject on the blackboard: death. Then she teaches. She lectures on it — historically, culturally, philosophically and occasionally turns to the bodies to ask what they think.
It’s absurd, and it’s meant to be. But the joke and the point are the same thing. Death is the one subject that concerns everyone, and it’s the one most cultures, especially in the West, refuse to talk about until there’s no choice. She holds the conversation anyway, in a room full of people who can no longer have it. That’s the irony. And discomfort, as it turns out, is exactly where conversation begins.
Image Credit: Marina Bay Sands
The Artscience museum at its core has always been unique as they always see the intersection of art and science, and the human body is where this is shown so well. The curatorial team got right is refusing to separate art from science and ask you to pick a side. Flesh and Bones makes that case through the work itself, without spelling it out.
Image Credit: MONO Malaysia
The body has been the subject of art and science for as long as both have existed. This exhibition doesn’t try to resolve that relationship, it just shows you how far people have gone, across centuries and cultures, to understand the thing they were already living inside. And how much of that understanding came not from the laboratory, but from someone who simply refused to look away. Flesh and Bones runs until 16 August 2026.
Find out more about The ArtScience Museum
Website | Instagram
